Tag Archives: Dental Care

QP: Griping about the Colbert appearance

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The prime minister was still in New York, but his deputy was present once again, while the Conservatives were revved up because this was their Supply Day, and they were busy gathering clips from their prepared speeches in favour of their non-confidence motion. With that in mind, Pierre Poilievre led off in French, and he immediately demanded that the Bloc vote against the government. The Speaker warned him about questions being related to administrative responsibilities of government, but Jean-Yves Duclos stood up anyway to denounce that Poilievre told people dental care doesn’t exist. Poilievre again listed the government’s supposed failures to demand the Bloc vote against them, and Soraya Martinez Ferrada decried that Conservative MP Jeremy Patzer got a trip paid for to Florida from a pro-life church. Poilievre switched to English to recite slogans and demand an election, and Mark Holland listed things the Conservatives would cut. Poilievre accused Holland of coming unglued before saying completely untrue things about pharmacare and demanded an election. Holland pointed out his scare-mongering before saying that free diabetes medication and contraceptions are actually freedom. Poilievre again claimed that pharmacare would “ban women” from using their existing drug plans before trotting out the “nuclear winter” line to demand an election. Karina Gould got up to say that freedom doesn’t look like trips to Florida to meet with anti-abortion groups.

Alain Therrien led for the Bloc, and demanded “justice” for seniors via enhancing OAS, and Steve MacKinnon listed efforts to help seniors and that the Bloc voted against it. Therrien declared that seniors deserve better than partisanship, and again demanded the OAS enhancement. MacKinnon again noted that the Bloc has always voted against more help for seniors, including dental care.

Jagmeet Singh demanded the Liberals stand up to Doug Ford around private health care, and Mark Holland said that if he wants to talk courage, the NDP capitulated to the Conservatives when bullied. Singh switched to French, and swapped François Legault for Ford, but asked the same thing. Holland urged parliamentarians to stand up to what the Conservatives would do to the healthcare system.

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Roundup: Coordinating a Venezuela response

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Friday evening, a statement went out from Canada and some twenty-one other allied governments about the situation in Venezuela. This after a couple of weeks of certain Conservative MPs and some of the Elder Pundits of this country having meltdowns that we haven’t issued immediate condemnations of the stolen election or demands that the opposition leader be recognized as the winner by Canada (and Conservatives currently feel motivated on this file because Pierre Poilievre’s wife is originally from Venezuela).

Lo and behold, Canada was working in concert with allies both in the region and abroad to ensure that there is a common voice when it comes to calling on support for democracy and human rights in Venezuela, particularly because Nicholas Maduro has been cracking down on protesters and arresting them, no doubt with the support of his Autocracy Inc. fellows, who have helped the country evade sanctions up to this point. Having coordinated responses with like-minded allies is a very important thing, and should not be underestimated.

And because this is currently an Anne Applebaum fan account, let me point to her most recent book, Autocracy Inc.,which includes a large section on Venezuela, how Chavez turned it into a kleptocracy under the guise of “Bolivarian socialism,” how other autocratic nations have allowed it to evade sanctions regimes (though it seems that China has been a bit burned by the very same kleptocrats that have bankrupted the country), and how the democratic opposition has been building support in that country in spite of the Maduro regime. It’s a great read, and I would highly encourage you to check it out (while we’ve still got some summer left).

Ukraine Dispatch

Ukraine’s air force downed five Russian drones overnight Thursday, while Ukrainian authorities are urging civilians to evacuate from Pokrovsk before Russians arrive in the area. Advances continue in the Kursk region, in the hopes of convincing Putin to start “fair” peace talks. Reporters who have visit the Kursk region under Ukraine’s control finds that there is a trial of destruction in their wake. Here’s a look at how vigilant Ukrainian society has become around allegations of corruption, in this case around reconstruction of the damaged children’s hospital.

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Roundup: Vandenbeld’s side—and a warning

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Liberal MP Anita Vandenbeld penned an op-ed over on National Newswatch to explain her side of what happened at the Status of Women committee last week, which has led to her and her staff being targeted and harassed off-line (because this is one of the tactics that Conservatives also employ and pretend they don’t, even though they know full well that they send their flying monkeys at the people they single out over social media). It’s an illuminating read that has a lot more of the backstory about how this committee was operating under its previous chair, some of the procedural elements of what happened that got lost in the noise around the witnesses walking out (never mind that they were set up from the start), and some of the rationale behind why this is happening. Don’t get me wrong—I think she still made a mistake in trying to make the public pivot to the abortion study motion, but the rest of the piece is a good insight into the problems at hand.

“Following Trumps playbook, since becoming Conservative Party Leader, Pierre Poilievre has put out a narrative that Parliament is broken, and the institutions are rigged. The Status of Women committee was living proof that this narrative was not true. And so Poilievre had to destroy it.”

This is one of the most important points as to why things are happening the way they are, beyond the clip-harvesting exercises. It’s one of the primary reasons why the Conservatives have been going hard after Speaker Fergus, why they are abusing privilege in demanding reams of unredacted documents and demanding that the Law Clerk do necessary redactions and not trained civil servants, why they try to tie arm’s-length agencies to the government or prime minister personally. It’s all out of the same authoritarian populism playbook.

But while she pointed out, I feel the need to call out Power & Politics’ abysmal coverage of this issue yesterday, with the guest host (reading from a script on a teleprompter) saying that Vandenbeld’s “behaviour” led to her being harassed, and in the discussion with the Power Panel that followed, was dismissive of the “minutiae of parliamentary procedure” when that was one of the key cruxes of what happened. Procedure was quite deliberately abused, and it led to this confrontation. And the panellists themselves being dismissive of the overall problem, and giving the tired lines of “only five people in the country care about this,” or “I’m shocked that there’s politics in politics!” as though what has been happening is normal. It’s not. Institutions are being deliberately undermined and that is a very serious problem, and it would be great if the gods damned pundit class in this country could actually arse itself to care about that fact rather than just fixating on the horse race numbers for once.

Ukraine Dispatch

Ukraine says that it downed two Russian missiles and four drones overnight, but that shelling killed four people in the Donetsk region, and that homes in the Kyiv region were damaged by a drone attack the night before. There are unconfirmed reports of a Ukrainian force in the Kursk region of Russia, but Ukraine won’t confirm or deny.

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Roundup: Giroux tries his hand at semantics

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Parliamentary Budget Officer Yves Giroux is at it again, deciding that he wants to play talking head pundit rather than sticking to the confines of his job. Case in point was his report on the proposed Digital Safety Office, and his calculations around staffing and the costs thereof (which the Conservatives have disingenuously suggested was reason to kill said office should they form government, when we know it has nothing to do with the costs). But Giroux has decided to make some utterly incomprehensible musings, talking about how “Canadians need to decide” if this is just “bureaucracy” or “enforcement” of the Act.

I’m not even sure where to start here. For one, of course it’s enforcement—that’s the whole gods damned point of the office. And there will be cost recovery in the way of fees and fines from the web giants, but Giroux didn’t bother to calculate what those could look like, because apparently, he can only pull certain methodologies out of his ass, but not others. But to try and play semantic games about whether or not this is “bureaucracy” is frankly baffling. What exactly is he trying to say? How is this at all related to his statutory responsibilities of providing economic and macro-economic analysis? It’s not, and Giroux should know that if he wants to be a pundit, he should resign and actually go do that.

But that’s not all. Giroux put out another report that is disputing Canada’s defence spending vis-à-vis GDP, so that he can weigh in on the Narrative about our commitments to NATO (without any actual context). Giroux claims that we’ll be below because the Canadian Forces has been lapsing certain levels of spending (which is true, and also a sign why we can’t just budget even more money that they can’t spend), but beyond this, he also decided he was going to use his own calculations for the GDP denominator instead of the OECD calculation that NATO uses, because he knows better, apparently. I mean, why have an apples-to-apples comparison that’s actually useful when you can pull a bespoke method from your ass in order to make a point, which again, is not within his remit to be doing. I’m going to be generous and say that there is a legitimate point about lapsing spending, but whatever he’s trying to do here is hardly within the confines of his job description, and more in line with his desire to be a media star.

Ukraine Dispatch

Russia launched a daytime airstrike against Ukraine that hit a children’s hospital in Kyiv, and which killed at least 41 civilians in total. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was in Warsaw to meet with the president of Poland to discuss strengthening air defences, as well as signing a bilateral defence cooperation agreement. Zelenskyy vowed retaliation for the strike, and called on allies to stand with him. Russia is claiming that Ukraine launched tens of drones at them, and that two power substations and an oil depot caught fire as a result.

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Roundup: Electoral reform tries to take the spotlight

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In addition to the constant wanking of pollsters and polling analysts, while the Elder Pundits continue to pronounce the end of Justin Trudeau’s political career, there has been an entire sub-category of commentary that is trying to tie this by-election loss to the failure to enact some kind of electoral reform, even though Trudeau has won two elections since then. Justin Ling wrote up a whole op-ed about this for the Star yesterday, given that the 84 candidates on the by-election ballot were because of a tantrum by electoral reform group to use the stunt to call attention to Trudeau’s broken promise. And Ling makes some wild assertions along the way.

This notion that MPs are more beholden to the party than to their constituents would not be fixed by changing the electoral system. In fact, the current system is the one that most empowers MPs to be beholden to their constituents, as most PR systems rely on party votes, and party lists to fill “proportional” seats, and that makes those MPs even more beholden to the leader because they don’t have the connection to a riding as a result. That’s an even worse outcome, and hands even more power to the leader to centralise, worse than they already do. The ability to be independent under such a PR system is even less than under the current system, so I have a hard time fathoming why anyone thinks that this solves any of those problems.

The current dysfunction that Ling complains about in the piece is not a result of the electoral system—it’s because of the perverse incentives that have developed, compounded by the Trump Effect, that have made rational discourse impossible because everything is about driving engagement over social media, not in the Houses of Parliament. Changing the electoral system wouldn’t change that—in fact, it could make it worse as parties fragment and fragile coalitions emerge that rely on extremists to play kingmaker, forcing parties to behave in even more outrageous fashions. Electoral reform doesn’t solve problems—it takes an existing set of problems and replaces them with a new set of problems. Resurrecting this debate in order to once again flog this dead horse is not helping anyone, and if anything, is just distracting from the actual frank conversations that parties need to be having amongst themselves with their members about how to meet the moment to solving the problems this country faces. PR won’t make that happen, and we have to stop entertaining the notion that it somehow will.

Programming Note: I’m taking the long weekend fully off of blogging, as well as a few days next week in order to work on another project.

Ukraine Dispatch

Ukrainian forces say that they have forced Russian troops out of part of Chasiv Yar. Some Ukrainian commanders are complaining that the Canadian-built Senator armoured vehicles aren’t built for off-road capability, break down too often, and aren’t well suited for the front lines. With the EU security pact now signed, president Volodymyr Zelenskyy called on European allies to fulfil their promises around arms and supports.

https://twitter.com/ukraine_world/status/1806344642041917773

https://twitter.com/defenceu/status/1806321424446951489

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Roundup: Nothing to opt out of

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Breaking through the endless wank-a-thon of the pundit class declaring that Justin Trudeau needs to go was a story where Danielle Smith had sent a letter to Trudeau declaring that Alberta will “opt out” of the dental care plan, and that they want to negotiate “compensation” that they would apply to their own provincial low-income dental assistance programme, but this seems to completely misunderstand how the programme works. It is very literally an insurance programme. Dental offices bill Sun Life through a portal, and the federal government then reimburses Sun Life. Yes, the rollout was poor and confused (because the whole implementation of this programme has been a bit of a gong show, thanks entirely to the NDP), but this is not a federal transfer programme. There is nothing to compensate the province for because this is a 100 percent federal insurance scheme.

The reason it’s structured this way is because the NDP demanded, as part of the Supply and Confidence Agreement, that this needed to be a fully federal programme, and not cost-shared like early learning and child care, and because dental care is ostensibly provincial jurisdiction, it had to be structured as insurance, and the model they would up choosing was to get Sun Life to do it, and they just pay Sun Life, rather than stand up a federal bureaucracy to administer this. This should have been a federal-provincial transfer so that provinces could bolster their existing dental programmes to federal guidelines, but no. As a result, I don’t see just what Smith can “opt out” of, let alone be compensated for.

Of course, federal health minister Mark Holland didn’t help matters by going on Power & Politics and not explaining how the programme works, and instead suggested that she could opt out if she could guarantee the same or better coverage, but again, opt out of what? The province isn’t billing Sun Life. They are out of the equation entirely, and Holland should have pointed this out, rather than just trying to sound conciliatory and saying he doesn’t want a fight, and repeating the same lines about how many tens of thousands of seniors have availed themselves of the programme to date. Smith doesn’t appear to understand how the programme works, and has created a strawman around it to make it look like she’s standing up to Trudeau (at the expense of her population), and claiming they already have a great dental care programme and that this is duplicative (it’s not—the Alberta programme covers very few people and is a burden to administer).

There is an added issue here with how the media have covered this. CBC, CTV, The Canadian Press, all ignore the programme structure and just retype Smith’s letter, and then get comments from the provincial dental association about either their disagreement on the federal programme or some minor pushback about Smith’s comments about the existing provincial programme, but the fact that this is an insurance company where the dentists bill Sun Life and the province has no involvement at all is a pretty crucial part of the story, which nobody mentions. This should not be rocket science, and this would show that Smith is engaging in bad theatre, but of course they don’t do that, and readers are being given a disservice as a result.

Ukraine Dispatch

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy visited troops on the front lines in the eastern Donetsk region. Zelenskyy is expected to sign a security agreement with the EU later today.

https://twitter.com/ukraine_world/status/1805883881356186102

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Roundup: A first step in breaking up the RCMP?

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RCMP Commissioner Mike Duheme was making media rounds this weekend, and said something interesting about how the government is planning to make changes to the structure of the RCMP, and to separate out the federal policing role (which the RMCP has not been doing a very good job of) while leaving the contract policing with provinces intact (more or less). Having a separate and dedicated federal policing agency would be a good thing, because then maybe it can be properly resourced and staffed to do the work that they’re supposed to be doing, rather than the money and personnel all being sapped by the contract policing wings. This could mean a more specialised police force for those roles, which are different than front-line policing.

This being said, I’m not sure that this is a solution to much, because maintaining the RMCP for their contract policing duties is not going to solve many problems because the Force is toxic and broken, and needs a radical overhaul that I don’t think is going to be possible from within the organization. Part of the problems that it has are because of its centralised nature, and sending officers fresh from training at Depot to parts of the country they have absolutely no familiarity with, and that creating its own source of problems. I get why the federal government wants to keep it around (aside from the branding of the Red Serge), which is that they basically subsidise the police forces of those provinces that use them, but that’s part of the problem, and it’s part of a hard conversation that should be had federally.

Incidentally, Duheme also says he hopes that no MP releases any names of possibly compromised MPs from the NSICOP report under the cover of Parliamentary privilege, for what it’s worth.

Ukraine Dispatch

At least one person was killed and eleven wounded in a Russian aerial attack on Kharkiv, while Russian authorities are claiming dozens of wounded from debris from a Ukrainian missile shot down over occupied Crimea. Russians also attacked a residential area of Kyiv, and energy facilities in the country’s southeast and west. Here is a look at midsummer festivals in Ukraine, with their pagan roots, and how this is seen as resistance as Russians try to erase Ukrainian culture.

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Roundup: Clearing the decks before summer

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It’s the last Wednesday of the spring sitting, and the big question is whether they’re going to pull the plug today or not. The government says there is still work to do—in particular, they want to push the Miscarriage of Justice Review Commission bill (Bill C-40) and the budget bill over the finish line, but the budget bill is up for a vote after QP tomorrow, leaving only C-40 at third reading debate, which is what is on for government orders tomorrow, and that’s the only bill they’re planning to bring forward for debate. This would make it pretty easy for them to pass a motion at unanimous consent to say something to the effect of it’ll pass on division or deemed pass at the collapse of debate at the end of the day, or some such if they really wanted, or to simply hold a vote at that point, and rise for the summer after that.

Of course, the Conservatives have been putting on a big song and dance about wanting to sit through the summer to “fix” the country, but we all know that’s all for show because that would mean nothing but more time for the government to keep passing bills and implementing their agenda, and that’s not what they want. They’re also trying to insist on committees sitting through the summer, but there are only two government bills at committee stage right now, so most of those meetings would likely be for private members’ business or for studies, and you can bet it’s going to be more of the latter, which would be little more than dog and pony shows to serve as clip factories while the House of Commons has risen. And if the Conservatives don’t agree for the House to rise tomorrow? Well, on the agenda are report stage debates on the cyber-security bill, the ports modernization bill, the (controversial) Métis self-government bill, and they have been debating the Elections Act changes, which the Conservatives and NDP are opposing because of bullshit objections to moving the fixed date back a week to avoid Diwali.

And then it’s up to the Senate to pass the number of bills on their plate, including the budget bill, and if they are true to recent form, they will race through their Order Paper until Friday, pass everything with little scrutiny other than maybe a few questions of the relevant minister at Committee of the Whole, and then rise by Friday, rather than stay another week or two to actually give things a proper review like they used to, back in the “bad old partisan days.”

Ukraine Dispatch

Ukraine is claiming responsibility for a drone attack causing a massive blaze at an oil reservoir in Russia’s Rostov region. Ukraine is investigating the suspected beheading of one of its soldiers by a Russian in the Donetsk region. Reuters has some photos of combat medics on the job on the front lines.

https://twitter.com/ukraine_world/status/1802984596122034588

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Roundup: The PBO immolates what little credibility he had left

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It looks like the Parliamentary Budget Officer, Yves Giroux, decided to extend his “winning” streak and cover himself in glory at the Commons’ finance committee yesterday, and once again immolated what credibility he has left. Defending his report, claiming he had access to a confidential report from Environment Canada that he was “gagged” from releasing (which the Conservatives jumped on and launched a thousand shitposts about, because committees are now only about content generation), lamented that the government doesn’t publish more climate modelling of their own, and how he hates how his reports are politicised, even though he’s been at this job for years and knows full well that PBO reports are always politicised, because that’s why MPs like them—so that they can both wield those reports as a cudgel, while hiding behind the shield of the PBO’s non-partisan “credibility” to keep the government from attacking it.

https://twitter.com/LindsayTedds/status/1797780078203671008

https://twitter.com/prairiecentrist/status/1797691621708054916

While this Tony Keller column lays out four major problems with the original carbon price report that the PBO produced—which again, Giroux continues to not really apologise for—energy economist Andrew Leach has some additional comments, driving home both how shallow the analysis is, and the fact that it’s not replicable because the PBO studiously refuses to explain his methodology, relying on “trust us, that’s our job.” But as we saw on P&P and again at finance committee, he complained that the government should be doing this kind of modelling work when it’s literally his one statutorily legislated job to do.

And to be helpful, Jennifer Robson provides some unsolicited advice on how the PBO could make his methodologies more transparent, if he actually wanted to do that (which I doubt, because so many of his reports rely on his pulling a novel methodology out of his ass, according to the many economists I’ve interviewed in the past). But that’s also part of the point about why he has no credibility left, and why he should start drafting that resignation letter.

https://twitter.com/lindsaytedds/status/1797817128483254759

Ukraine Dispatch:

A civilian was killed in a Russian strike on a recreation facility in Kharkiv. Here’s a look at what to expect from Ukraine’s peace summit to be held in Switzerland next week.

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Roundup: Anecdotes about emigration

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It was a CBC story that caught the attention of Pierre Poilievre, and which his deputy leader brought up in Question Period, being one centred around census data showing a growing number of Canadians who are relocating to the US, and which tries to focus the attention on those who insist that they’re moving because Justin Trudeau has been so terrible. But this is also a story from a particular usual suspect, so it’s thinly sourced and written by a certain usual suspect who had a habit of this kind of sloppy work (and no, it’s not because he has any particular political agenda—it’s because he thinks he’s being edgy and that he’s tackling “big” things, even though he’s been relatively terrible about it.

To be clear, the story has no breakdown in the data to show much of anything useful about just who is moving, particularly from certain age groups and demographics, nor where they are moving to. This could be a case of retiring Boomers heading to Arizona and Florida and saying farewell to Canadian winters for good, but we don’t know. It does point out that a third of those who emigrate to the US were themselves Americans by birth returning home, and less than a third are immigrants to Canada from elsewhere who have since decided to move to the US, but for some of them, that could have been their plan all along. One of the profiled couples are fairly young and say that housing prices are an issue, but given how restrictive their immigration policies are, it’s hard to see how that many people are able to move just because housing is cheaper. This could also be a largely Ontario-driven phenomenon, but again, we have no breakdown in the data.

This is a big issue, but there is no attempt to get more clarity in the data. Instead, the focus is on getting anecdotes about how they hate Trudeau and want to move because of it, which is both an attempt to make this a federal story instead of a provincial housing one (and the usual suspect writing this piece has a history of doing that), but also because he thinks it’s going to get attention to the piece, and that’s exactly what it did, no matter how thin those anecdotes are, and the plural of anecdotes is not data. We shouldn’t need to remind a reporter at the gods damned public broadcaster of this fact, but things are off the rails there, and this is the kind of bullshit we get as a result.

Ukraine Dispatch:

Russian missiles hit three sites in Kharkiv overnight, as Ukrainian forces work to shoot down seven missiles and 32 drones. While Russians continue aerial attacks on Kharkiv, they have also increased their troop concentration in the region, looking like they will make a push toward the city. Word is coming out that president Joe Biden has quietly given the okay for Ukraine to use American-made and supplied weapons to strike military targets inside of Russia.

https://twitter.com/kyivindependent/status/1796418752411840609

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